Forecasts predict that the AI (chipsets) market is expected to grow from USD 7.06 Billion in 2018 to USD 59.26 Billion by 2025, at a CAGR of 35.5% from 2018 to 2025 (Business Wire, 2018), the chip market is no longer standing still. As we approach a paradigm shift in computing, there is little doubt that a combination of the processing units currently in development will accelerate AI research and development, far beyond the capabilities of current platforms. There is need for sharing knowledge on the best way to turn this shift into an opportunity and roadmap the future ahead.

Past attendees include:

Testimonials

The Speakers

Albert Liu

Co-Founder & CEO

Kneron

After graduating from Taiwan Cheng Kung University, Liu was awarded a scholarship from Raytheon and the University of California to join the UC Berkeley/UCLA/UCSD research programs, later received his PhD in Electrical Engineering from UCLA. He has worked in R&D and management positions at Qualcomm, the Samsung Electronics R&D center, MStar and Wireless Information. During his tenure at Qualcomm, he led an R&D team which gained 9 technology patents and won the company ImpaQt research and development award.

Albert Liu

Co-Founder & CEO

Kneron

After graduating from Taiwan Cheng Kung University, Liu was awarded a scholarship from Raytheon and the University of California to join the UC Berkeley/UCLA/UCSD research programs, later received his PhD in Electrical Engineering from UCLA. He has worked in R&D and management positions at Qualcomm, the Samsung Electronics R&D center, MStar and Wireless Information. During his tenure at Qualcomm, he led an R&D team which gained 9 technology patents and won the company ImpaQt research and development award.

Kneron was founded in San Diego in 2015. It provides software and hardware integrated AI solutions, including Neural processing unit (NPU), a dedicated edge AI device processor and a range of visual recognition software. Kneron currently has offices in San Diego, Taipei, Shenzhen and Zhuhai and has partners and customers around the world.

Kneron announced the completion of series A financing in November, 2017. Alibaba Entrepreneurs Fund and CDIB Capital Group are the lead investors, and Himax Technologies Inc, Qualcomm, Thundersoft, Sequoia Capital (sub fund: Cloudatlas), and CY ZONE are co-investors. Kneron completed its series A1 financing led by Horizons Ventures, a venture capital firm founded by Ka-shing Li, in May 2018.

Dr. Kai Yu

Co-Founder & CEO

Horizon Robotics Inc

Dr. Kai Yu is a co-founder and CEO of Horizon Robotics Inc. He is an internationally-recognized pioneer and leader in deep learning and artificial intelligence. He was the founder and Head of Baidu Institute of Deep Learning (IDL), the first and most established artificial intelligence R&D center in China's industry. Dr. Yu has been elected to China's “Top 1000 Talents”, a prestigious group of technology leaders in the country. He has published around 60 papers with more than 13,000 citations.

Dr. Kai Yu

Co-Founder & CEO

Horizon Robotics Inc

Dr. Kai Yu is a co-founder and CEO of Horizon Robotics Inc. He is an internationally-recognized pioneer and leader in deep learning and artificial intelligence. He was the founder and Head of Baidu Institute of Deep Learning (IDL), the first and most established artificial intelligence R&D center in China's industry. Dr. Yu has been elected to China's “Top 1000 Talents”, a prestigious group of technology leaders in the country. He has published around 60 papers with more than 13,000 citations. In 2011 as an adjunct faculty, he taught a class “CS121: Introduction to Artificial Intelligence" at the Computer Sciences Department of Stanford University.

Zhang Li

Vice President

Canaan Creative

Vice President of Canaan Creative. Ms. Zhang Li obtained her Master of Engineering degree from Tsinghua University, with a CPA certificate. Ms. Zhang Li has worked for PricewaterhouseCoopers (PWC) and Guotai Junan Securities M&A Department. She has led several overseas listing projects and has served more than 10 A-share listed companies in the internet and service sectors.

Zhang Li

Vice President

Canaan Creative

Vice President of Canaan Creative. Ms. Zhang Li obtained her Master of Engineering degree from Tsinghua University, with a CPA certificate. Ms. Zhang Li has worked for PricewaterhouseCoopers (PWC) and Guotai Junan Securities M&A Department. She has led several overseas listing projects and has served more than 10 A-share listed companies in the internet and service sectors. Since 2014, she has been the vice president and secretary of the board of Hangzhou Shunwang Technology, the leading Internet entertainment platform company in China, responsible for the company's strategic planning, mergers and acquisitions and investment. During her tenure, Ms. Zhang Li led the investment in the domestic outstanding film and television entertainment company Ciwen Media, mixed ownership of the first single China Telecom's love game base, Donews, iKuai wifi. In addition, she led the acquisition of the light casual game platform 91y, the world's largest game show Chinajoy and China’s leading security platform Guo Rui Xin An.

In 2018, Ms. Zhangl Li established Canaan Creative’s investment team and an international legal team, led the AI business from scratch, and promoted the company to further deepen the edge of AI.

Jian Ouyang

Chief Architect, Kunlun

Baidu

Jian Ouyang is the principal architect for Baidu’s Kunlun chip team and leads the data center architecture team. Currently, he is looking for non-traditional architecture and systems for big data and AI applications in the post-Moore’s law era. He has authored or co-authored several papers on various conferences, such as ASPLOS2014, Hotchips2014, EuroSys2014, etc.

Jian Ouyang

Chief Architect, Kunlun

Baidu

Jian Ouyang is the principal architect for Baidu’s Kunlun chip team and leads the data center architecture team. Currently, he is looking for non-traditional architecture and systems for big data and AI applications in the post-Moore’s law era. He has authored or co-authored several papers on various conferences, such as ASPLOS2014, Hotchips2014, EuroSys2014, etc.

Adrian Mendes

COO

Groq

Adrian Mendes has 20 years of experience in the high-tech industry as a founder as well as leading operations and building teams at successful Silicon Valley semiconductor companies. He spent 13+ years at Cypress Semiconductor where he oversaw Global Operations, and then moved into senior management positions in Atmel Corporation, Ice House, Pacific Private Equity Group, Quant Power and Pacific Infra Capital. He used to oversee Product Development at Groq for nearly 2 years, before becoming COO.

Adrian Mendes

COO

Groq

Adrian Mendes has 20 years of experience in the high-tech industry as a founder as well as leading operations and building teams at successful Silicon Valley semiconductor companies. He spent 13+ years at Cypress Semiconductor where he oversaw Global Operations, and then moved into senior management positions in Atmel Corporation, Ice House, Pacific Private Equity Group, Quant Power and Pacific Infra Capital. He used to oversee Product Development at Groq for nearly 2 years, before becoming COO.

Brett Simpson

Co-Founder & Partner

Arete Research

Brett Simpson is a co-founder of Arete (formed in 2000) and is based in the firm's London office. He focuses on the global semiconductor component sector. Brett is a regular public speaker at industry events and after 17 years looking at the sector, has a wealth of experience to draw on. Prior to Arete, Brett spent two years at Goldman Sachs in an equity analyst role, specialising in European technology following three years with Ericsson UK, working in business development, covering all aspects of wireline and wireless telecom infrastructure.

Brett Simpson

Co-Founder & Partner

Arete Research

Brett Simpson is a co-founder of Arete (formed in 2000) and is based in the firm's London office. He focuses on the global semiconductor component sector. Brett is a regular public speaker at industry events and after 17 years looking at the sector, has a wealth of experience to draw on. Prior to Arete, Brett spent two years at Goldman Sachs in an equity analyst role, specialising in European technology following three years with Ericsson UK, working in business development, covering all aspects of wireline and wireless telecom infrastructure.

Cheng Wang

Co-Founder & SVP, Architecture & Engineering

Flex Logix

CHENG WANG. Senior VP Engineering: Architecture, Software, Silicon. Originally from Shanghai, PRC. BSEECS, UC Berkeley. Cheng has led the architecture, silicon implementation and software development for eFPGA over two generations from 180nm-16nm and now neural inferencing. Two years as VLSI designer at Zoran. MSEE, EE PhD UCLA: designed 5 FPGA chips from 90nm to 40nm. 2013 Distinguished PhD Dissertation Award. 2014 ISSCC Lewis Winner Award for Outstanding Paper. Multiple patents at UCLA and Flex Logix.

Cheng Wang

CHENG WANG. Senior VP Engineering: Architecture, Software, Silicon. Originally from Shanghai, PRC. BSEECS, UC Berkeley. Cheng has led the architecture, silicon implementation and software development for eFPGA over two generations from 180nm-16nm and now neural inferencing. Two years as VLSI designer at Zoran. MSEE, EE PhD UCLA: designed 5 FPGA chips from 90nm to 40nm. 2013 Distinguished PhD Dissertation Award. 2014 ISSCC Lewis Winner Award for Outstanding Paper. Multiple patents at UCLA and Flex Logix.

Flex Logix’s NMAX platform excels at getting high hardware utilization at batch=1, which is critical for edge applications. Most of the new information is in the 2nd half of the slide deck.

NMAX delivers from 1 to 100+TOPS, as you need, at 10x lower cost and 3-5x lower power than existing solutions because we get 50-80% MAC utilization on tough models, meaning we need less silicon area, and we achieve it with 10x less DRAM bandwidth, meaning less DRAM cost and system power.

Kunle Olukotun

Co-founder and Chief Technologist

SambaNova Systems

Kunle Olukotun is Cadence Design Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at Stanford University. He founded Afara Websystems, acquired by Sun in 2002. He is a Pioneer of Chip Multiprocessor Designs, Director of the Stanford Pervasive Parallelism Lab, and Co-leader of the Data Analytics for What’s Next (DAWN) research program.

In 2017 Olukotun and Chris Ré founded SambaNova Systems. SambaNova Systems has developed a disruptive next-generation computing platform to power machine learning and data analytics.

Kunle Olukotun

Co-founder and Chief Technologist

SambaNova Systems

Kunle Olukotun is Cadence Design Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at Stanford University. He founded Afara Websystems, acquired by Sun in 2002. He is a Pioneer of Chip Multiprocessor Designs, Director of the Stanford Pervasive Parallelism Lab, and Co-leader of the Data Analytics for What’s Next (DAWN) research program.

In 2017 Olukotun and Chris Ré founded SambaNova Systems. SambaNova Systems has developed a disruptive next-generation computing platform to power machine learning and data analytics.

Li Yunpeng

Founder, President & CEO

Iluvatar CoreX

Mr. Li Graduated from the Department of Computer Science and Technology at Nanjing University in 2002 and obtained his master’s degree in computer science from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2005. He worked at Oracle Corporation from 2005 to 2015, where he was engaged in the design, research and development of database infrastructure software, as well as technical management work. He went on to become Director of software development in the Database Division at Oracle.

Li Yunpeng

Founder, President & CEO

Iluvatar CoreX

Mr. Li Graduated from the Department of Computer Science and Technology at Nanjing University in 2002 and obtained his master’s degree in computer science from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2005. He worked at Oracle Corporation from 2005 to 2015, where he was engaged in the design, research and development of database infrastructure software, as well as technical management work. He went on to become Director of software development in the Database Division at Oracle. His ten-year career in Silicon Valley allowed him to gain a deeper understanding of the information platform industry and its products. In 2015, he returned to China and founded Iluvatar CoreX, beginning the transition from technical expert to start-up founder and entrepreneur.

Li Yunpeng has always kept abreast of trends in technological development and is fully aware of the opportunities for qualitative change that new technologies such as cloud computing, big data and artificial intelligence can bring to the digital transformation of enterprises. He believes that the enterprise cloud computing market will shift from industry digitization to digital industrialization, and there will be a wide market for platform products that resolve the issue of computing power during the great wave of enterprise digital industrialization represented by AI. Therefore, combining his own advantages with those of his team, he came back to China and founded Iluvatar CoreX in 2015.

Lingjie Xu

Director, Applied AI Architecture

Alibaba Cloud

Lingjie Xu is a director of Alibaba Cloud and he is in charge of heterogeneous computing infrastructure, including GPUs and AI ASICs. His team is currently focusing on applied AI architecture and SW/HW interplay. On September 2018, he launched AI Matrix benchmark suite for deep learning. Before joining Alibaba, he held various senior management and architect roles in NVIDIA, AMD and Samsung.

Lingjie Xu

Director, Applied AI Architecture

Alibaba Cloud

Lingjie Xu is a director of Alibaba Cloud and he is in charge of heterogeneous computing infrastructure, including GPUs and AI ASICs. His team is currently focusing on applied AI architecture and SW/HW interplay. On September 2018, he launched AI Matrix benchmark suite for deep learning. Before joining Alibaba, he held various senior management and architect roles in NVIDIA, AMD and Samsung.

Dr. Shouyi Yin

Associate Professor & Vice Director, Institute of Microelectronics

Tsinghua University

Dr. Shouyi Yin received B.S, M.S. and Ph.D. from Tsinghua University in 2000, 2002 and 2005 respectively. He has been with Imperial College London, London, U.K., as a Post doc during 2005-2007. He is currently with the Institute of Microelectronics (IME), Tsinghua University, as an Associate Professor. He is now the vice director of IME and leading the division of Computer-Aided Design. His current research interests include reconfigurable computing, neural network accelerator chip design, HLS, SoC and embedded system design. Dr.

Dr. Shouyi Yin

Associate Professor & Vice Director, Institute of Microelectronics

Tsinghua University

Dr. Shouyi Yin received B.S, M.S. and Ph.D. from Tsinghua University in 2000, 2002 and 2005 respectively. He has been with Imperial College London, London, U.K., as a Post doc during 2005-2007. He is currently with the Institute of Microelectronics (IME), Tsinghua University, as an Associate Professor. He is now the vice director of IME and leading the division of Computer-Aided Design. His current research interests include reconfigurable computing, neural network accelerator chip design, HLS, SoC and embedded system design. Dr. Yin has published one book, a handful of book chapters, and more than 100 journal and conference papers. He has been granted with 45 China patents with other 39 pending applications. He has led the research and implementation of reconfigurable neural network processor “Thinker”. He once won the first prize of National Technology &Invention Award.

Dr. Thomas Andersen

Head of Machine Learning & AI Design Group

Synopsys

Dr. Andersen heads the artificial intelligence and machine learning design group at Synopsys, where he focuses on developing new technologies in the AI and ML space to automate the future of chip design. He has more than 20 years of experience in the semiconductor and EDA industry. Dr. Andersen started his career at IBM’s TJ Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights, New York, followed by managing synthesis/place-and-route engineering at Magma Design Automation and Synopsys. He holds a Master’s degree from the University of Stuttgart and a Ph.D.

Dr. Thomas Andersen

Head of Machine Learning & AI Design Group

Synopsys

Dr. Andersen heads the artificial intelligence and machine learning design group at Synopsys, where he focuses on developing new technologies in the AI and ML space to automate the future of chip design. He has more than 20 years of experience in the semiconductor and EDA industry. Dr. Andersen started his career at IBM’s TJ Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights, New York, followed by managing synthesis/place-and-route engineering at Magma Design Automation and Synopsys. He holds a Master’s degree from the University of Stuttgart and a Ph.D. in Computer Engineering from the University of Kaiserslautern in Germany.

Yi Shan

Senior Director, AI

Xilinx

Yi Shan was Co-Founder & CTO of DeePhi, where he took charge of all the engineering management and product definition, before DeePhi was acquired by Xilinx in 2018. He is now Senior Director, AI at Xilinx.

He has worked on FPGA and ASIC design for machine learning applications for more than 10 years, at companies such as Horizon Robotics and Baidu.

His paper published in FPGA2010, on machine learning acceleration with FPGAs, has been cited by more than 300 times.

Yi Shan

Senior Director, AI

Xilinx

Yi Shan was Co-Founder & CTO of DeePhi, where he took charge of all the engineering management and product definition, before DeePhi was acquired by Xilinx in 2018. He is now Senior Director, AI at Xilinx.

He has worked on FPGA and ASIC design for machine learning applications for more than 10 years, at companies such as Horizon Robotics and Baidu.

His paper published in FPGA2010, on machine learning acceleration with FPGAs, has been cited by more than 300 times.

Yichen Shen

Co-founder and CEO

Lightelligence

Yichen Shen is a co-founder and CEO of Lightelligence. He received his PhD degree in Physics from MIT in 2016, where his research focused on nanophotonics and artificial intelligence. Through his PhD, Yichen has published more than 25 peer-reviewed journal papers and has filed 10 US patents, including first authored papers in Science, Nature Photonics, and ICML (the top machine learning conference). In 2017, Yichen received Forbes 30 under 30 Global and MIT Technology Review 35 Innovators under 35 (TR35) China.

Yichen Shen

Co-founder and CEO

Lightelligence

Yichen Shen is a co-founder and CEO of Lightelligence. He received his PhD degree in Physics from MIT in 2016, where his research focused on nanophotonics and artificial intelligence. Through his PhD, Yichen has published more than 25 peer-reviewed journal papers and has filed 10 US patents, including first authored papers in Science, Nature Photonics, and ICML (the top machine learning conference). In 2017, Yichen received Forbes 30 under 30 Global and MIT Technology Review 35 Innovators under 35 (TR35) China.

Jason Lu

VP of Sales

Graphcore

Jason Lu is VP of Sales at Graphcore, and he is overseeing sales and business activities in China. He is currently focusing on setting up a strong business and technical team to introduce Graphcore’s IPU technology to innovators in China. Before joining Graphcore, he spent 13 years at Cavium where he was the GM for their business in China and he started China operations for Cavium.

Jason Lu

VP of Sales

Graphcore

Jason Lu is VP of Sales at Graphcore, and he is overseeing sales and business activities in China. He is currently focusing on setting up a strong business and technical team to introduce Graphcore’s IPU technology to innovators in China. Before joining Graphcore, he spent 13 years at Cavium where he was the GM for their business in China and he started China operations for Cavium.

Synopsys

Smart, Secure Everything—From Silicon to Software

Synopsys technology is at the heart of innovations that are changing the way we live and work. The Internet of Things. Autonomous cars. Wearables. Smart medical devices. Secure financial services. Machine learning and computer vision. These breakthroughs are ushering in the era of Smart, Secure Everything―where devices are getting smarter, everything’s connected, and everything must be secure.

Powering this new era of technology are advanced silicon chips, which are made even smarter by the remarkable software that drives them. Synopsys is at the forefront of Smart, Secure Everything with the world’s most advanced tools for silicon chip design, verification, IP integration, and application security testing. Our technology helps customers innovate from Silicon to Software, so they can deliver Smart, Secure Everything.

Gold Partner

Flex Logix

Flex Logix’ NMAX inferencing accelerators provide very high throughput and hardware utilization even at batch size = 1, with low system cost and system power.

NMAX MAC utilization is over 50% even at batch size = 1. For most inferencing engines utilization drops dramatically from batch 10 to batch 1 because they stall loading weights. High MAC utilization means less silicon area needed for the same throughput.

NMAX uses proprietary Flex Logix interconnect technology to utilize local, distributed SRAM very efficiently generating very high local bandwidth and dropping DRAM bandwidth requires to that of 1 or 2 LPDDR4 DRAMs, even for YOLOv3 at 30 frames/second. This lowers power and lowers cost.

NMAX will be available in TSMC16FFC/12FFC in mid 2019.

Teradyne

Teradyne is a leading supplier of automation equipment for test and industrial applications. For over 50 years, Teradyne's Automatic Test Equipment (ATE) has been used to test semiconductors that power automotive, industrial, communications, consumer, and computer applications. Across the AI chip ecosystem, Teradyne brings ATE knowledge and experience, trusted semiconductor supply chain partnerships, differentiated test solutions, and committed customer support to the growing AI industry.

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